Sometimes I yearn for silence but am stirred awake by voices yelling, fighting for every sense to awaken. I walked to the key shop on the corner of Orange Show Road and “E” Street by the Target. The window slid open and the place reeked of cigarette smoke. The person asks with her eyes what the purpose of my visit was. I replied, business as usual. And so the business of her body captured in a hut no bigger than a closet came to my mind. All these keys hanging on the walls sporadically aligned. Her face was lined and slender expressing 40 to 50 years of saying hello under her breath, now belabored by cigarette smoke. Her muted tone of surrender echoed through my mind. She watched as I spread the key on my finger stretching it past the key chain. “You can keep it there”, she said, saving me the trouble of taking off what’s perfectly fine. She didn’t smile or seem to miss company. She was alone.
Alone from day to day until a head pops up by her window asking for a copy of some office or house key. What if I can make her smile? Would the sky open up and collapse under the poetry of the moment? I caress the idea like a feline dripping with sleep. How many days has she been stuck behind those keyed walls counting the slow minutes dry up like a raisin baking in the hot San Bernardino sun. I wonder what her answer was when as a little girl she was asked what she wants to be when she grows up. She probably saw visions of dancing with princes with Cinderella slippers turn into grey, grey clouds. She took the key from the machine, split it against the brush apparatus, and rang up my purchase for a buck and some change. I pulled the five from my wallet which I stared at intently like my wallet would open up and tell me my future like a fortune reader. I laughed at the idea that I knew where tomorrow would lead. She locked up the window and shut herself away from the madness calling outside.
“I want to sketch everyone I hear and see with these words crawling through my mind so that I can say we are all beautiful!” I felt like shouting as I drove away. So I drove about five hundred linear feet away to buy household products to make my place clean and to make my life sane. I saved a couple bucks with a Red Card. I went back to work. I made myself some food. I worked for a few more hours only to break because I wanted to tell her story as she spends those minutes locked away, so happily away.
Alone from day to day until a head pops up by her window asking for a copy of some office or house key. What if I can make her smile? Would the sky open up and collapse under the poetry of the moment? I caress the idea like a feline dripping with sleep. How many days has she been stuck behind those keyed walls counting the slow minutes dry up like a raisin baking in the hot San Bernardino sun. I wonder what her answer was when as a little girl she was asked what she wants to be when she grows up. She probably saw visions of dancing with princes with Cinderella slippers turn into grey, grey clouds. She took the key from the machine, split it against the brush apparatus, and rang up my purchase for a buck and some change. I pulled the five from my wallet which I stared at intently like my wallet would open up and tell me my future like a fortune reader. I laughed at the idea that I knew where tomorrow would lead. She locked up the window and shut herself away from the madness calling outside.
“I want to sketch everyone I hear and see with these words crawling through my mind so that I can say we are all beautiful!” I felt like shouting as I drove away. So I drove about five hundred linear feet away to buy household products to make my place clean and to make my life sane. I saved a couple bucks with a Red Card. I went back to work. I made myself some food. I worked for a few more hours only to break because I wanted to tell her story as she spends those minutes locked away, so happily away.
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